Monthly Bonus: Finding Inspiration

Where do you find your inspiration?

I’m a member of the international group of picture book illustrators called Illoguild. Each month, we each answer a question here on Substack. For September, that question is: “Where do you find your inspiration?”

My answer: Everywhere. But while that IS an honest answer, it’s not very helpful to you, is it? So, here’s the thing, our brains can be pretty awesome. We ask our brains for ideas and connections and they happily set to work coming up with all sorts of nonsense! But, in order to make those connections, or “be inspired”, sometimes we have to help things along a bit. So, I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve used over the years:

Chad Beckerman’s 100 things.
A couple of years ago, agent Chad Beckerman spoke at an SCBWI virtual conference. In his talk, he suggested that illustrators make a list of 100 things they like to draw, then draw them, then combine things together to create new things. I immediately made my list on a huge whiteboard and placed it where I could see it in my studio.

Seeing 100 things I am interested in written out on a large list meant that my brain had a chance to play every time I walked by. “Hey brain, Pick two and combine them. What would that look like? Does it get a reaction? What kind of reaction? Funny, sad, disgusting, or just meh?”

When you find the strongest reactions on your list, sketch them up! If everything on the list is something you enjoy, you’re more likely to enjoy working on that project, right? Then, you’ll fill your portfolio with work you want to get! This works for coming up with story ideas too.

Tara Lazar’s Storystorm.
Every day in January, Tara has guests on her blog give one inspirational tip a day. The challenge is to come up with 30 story ideas by the end of the month. Even though it happens in January, there’s an archive, so you can play along right now if you want to.

Make bad work
I’m in a creative accountability group with amazing puppeteers where we talk about our creative goals. We meet every week and report what we’ve done and identify any roadblocks preventing us from reaching those goals. When someone is stuck creatively or dealing with perfectionism, one of the things we advise is to change the goal from “make an X” to “make a bad X.” It’s easy to do a bad job at something, right? Making the goal to fail can release the pressure and get you into play mode faster. And, if the thing doesn’t come out as good as you wanted, you probably learned something and can do better next time. But, you’ve started the project and checked something off your list! Progress is better than no progress. Fail faster so you can get to the good stuff.

In the Submission Ready class over at Storyteller Academy with Ariel Richardson and Melissa Manlove, they also promote the notion of bad ideas leading to good ones. Write out every bad idea you can think of. Eventually your brain will run out of bad ideas and come up with good ones. Or, you can find a bad idea to tweak into a good one.

Think up questions rather than answers.
Look at all of the lists you’ve generated from the exercises above, and instead of brainstorming answers, brainstorm some questions! For example, What would happen if a dog met a shark? Would they meet on land or in the sea? How did each one get there? What were they doing there? Why do they want to do that thing? What’s stopping them from doing the thing they want to do? How do they end up doing it or not doing it?

Here’s a fancy article I found that backs me up on this question brainstorming thing: https://hbr.org/2018/03/better-brainstorming

Looking for more tips? My illoguild friends have a lot more to say on this topic:
http://illoguild.substack.com

Thanks for reading! Do you have tips to share on how you find inspiration? Or any thoughts on the above suggestions? Drop them in the comments!